Chapter 5 4. Teleportation

Teleportation, or the ability to instantaneously transport a person or object from one location to another, is a technology that could alter the course of civilization and alter the destiny of nations.It would irreversibly change the rules of warfare: the military could teleport troops behind enemy lines, or simply teleport enemy leaders and capture them.Today's transportation systems—from cars and boats to planes and railroads, and all the vast industries that serve them—would never be used again.We can simply teleport ourselves to work and our goods to market.Vacations will become effortless as we can teleport ourselves to our destination.Teleportation will change everything.

The earliest references to teleportation can be found in religious texts such as the Bible, where spirits whisk people away.This passage from the New Testament Acts seems to suggest teleportation from Philip of Gaza to Azotus: "When they Appearing from the water, God suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but continued on his way joyfully. However, Philip appeared at Azotus, traveled about, and preached the Gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea" (New Testament 8:36-40). Teleportation is also part of every magician's tricks and illusions: a rabbit is pulled from a hat, playing cards emerge from his or her sleeve, coins are pulled from behind someone's ear.One of the grandest tricks of modern times involves making an elephant disappear before a startled audience.In this performance, a giant elephant weighing several tons is kept in a cage.Then, with the flick of a magic wand, the elephant disappeared, much to the amazement of the audience. (Of course, the elephants didn't actually disappear. The magic was performed using mirrors. Long, thin, upright strips of mirrors were placed behind each iron bar of the cage. Like a door, the bars Each of the mirrors can be rotated. At the beginning of the magic, when all these upright strip mirrors were placed neatly behind the iron bars, the mirrors were invisible and the elephant was visible. But when these mirrors were rotated 45 degrees Facing the viewer, the elephant disappears, leaving the viewer staring blankly at the image reflected from one side of the cage.)

The first mention of teleportation in science fiction was in Edward Page Mitchell's 1977 novel A Man without a Body.In the novel, a scientist is able to take apart the atoms of a cat and send them across a telegraph wire.Unfortunately, the battery died while the scientist was trying to teleport himself, and only his head was successfully teleported. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known for his Sherlock Holmes novels, was fascinated by the concept of teleportation.After years and years of writing detective novels and short stories, he grew tired of the Sherlock Holmes series and eventually killed his detective, sending him to his death over the waterfall with Professor Moriarty.But the public outcry was so high that Conan Doyle was forced to bring the detective back to life.Unable to kill Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle instead decided to create a whole new series starring Professor Challenger, Holmes' counterpart.Both have the quick wit and sharp eyes to solve mysteries.But Holmes uses cool, detective logic to crack complex cases; Professor Challenger explores the dark world of psychic powers and paranormal phenomena, including teleportation.In the 1927 novel The Disintegration Machine, the professor meets a gentleman who has invented a machine that can disassemble a person and reassemble it elsewhere.But when the inventor boasts that his machine, if it falls into the wrong hands, can dismantle cities of millions at the touch of a button, Professor Challenger is horrified.Later, Professor Challenger disassembled the inventor using a machine, and then left the laboratory without assembling him again.

More recently, Hollywood has discovered teleportation. The 1958 film (The Fly) is a vivid look at what happens when teleportation goes horribly wrong.When a scientist succeeds in teleporting himself from one end of a room to the other, his atoms mix with those of a fly that accidentally enters the teleportation room, and the scientist becomes a mutated monstrosity, half human, half human. The Fly (a remake starring Jeff Goldblum came out in 1986). Teleportation first gained prominence in popular culture with the Star Trek franchise. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry introduced teleportation to the series because Paramount Studio's budget couldn't afford to simulate a spaceship taking off on a distant planet and the expensive special effects required to land.Simply teleporting the Enterprise's crew to their destination was less expensive.

Over the years, scientists have raised an unknown number of objections to the possible existence of teleportation.To teleport a person would have to know the precise location of every atom in a living body, which would violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (which states that we cannot know the exact position and momentum of an electron). The producers of "Star Trek" defied their critics and introduced "Heisenberg compensators" in the teleportation room, as if we could compensate the laws of quantum physics by adding a gadget to the teleporter.But as it turns out, the necessity to create these Heisenberg compensators is far from ripe.Early critics and scientists may have been wrong.

According to Newton's theory, teleportation is undoubtedly impossible.Newton's laws are based on the idea that matter consists of tiny, hard pinballs.Objects do not move without the application of external forces; objects do not suddenly disappear and reappear elsewhere. But in quantum theory, that's exactly what particles can do.Newton's laws, which had been absolutely dominant for 250 years, were overturned in 1925, and Quantum Theory was developed by Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and their colleagues.Analyzing the weird properties of atoms, physicists discovered that electrons move like waves and that they can make quantum leaps in seemingly disordered motion within atoms.

The person most associated with these quantum waves was the Vienna-born physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who wrote the famous wave equation that bears his name, one of the most important equations in the fields of physics and chemistry.Entire graduate courses in physics are devoted to solving his famous equations, and physics libraries fill entire walls with works examining its far-reaching implications.In principle, the whole of chemistry can be reduced to the solution of this equation. In 1905, Einstein demonstrated that light waves have the properties of particles, that is, they can be described as packets of energy called photons.But by the 1920s, Schrödinger increasingly felt that the reverse was also true: Particles like electrons could exhibit wave behavior.This hypothesis was first proposed by the French physicist Louis de Broglie, who won a Nobel Prize for this conjecture (In universities, we demonstrate this to undergraduates. We do this in a cathode ray tube - such as the ones you usually find in a TV set - ignites electrons inside. The electrons go through a tiny hole, so usually you can see a tiny dot left by an electron hitting the TV screen instead of what you might expect That way, when a wave—rather than a point particle—passes through a hole, it leaves concentric wavy rings).

One day, Schrödinger gave a lecture on this peculiar phenomenon.He was challenged by a fellow physicist, Peter Debye, who asked Schrödinger: If electrons are described by waves, what is their wave equation? Since Newton created calculus, physicists have been able to describe waves with differential equations, so Schrödinger took Debye's problem-writing differential equations as a challenge.Schrödinger was away on vacation that month, and when he returned he had already written the equations.Just as Maxwell before him used Faraday's force field to extract the Maxwell equation of light; Schrödinger used de Broglie's matter wave to extract the Schrödinger equation of photons.

(Historians of science have made some effort to search out exactly what Schrödinger did when he discovered the equation that changed the face of modern physics and chemistry forever. Schrödinger was apparently a believer in free love, and was kept by lovers or his wife Accompanied on vacation. He even kept a detailed diary archive of all his numerous lovers, meticulously coding each encounter. Historians now believe that, in the week he discovered the equation, he was with his One of his girlfriends lives at Villa Herwig in the Alps.) When Schrödinger set out to solve the equations for the hydrogen atom, he was rather surprised to find that the exact energy levels of hydrogen had been carefully codified by previous physicists.He soon realized that Niels Bohr's old diagram of the atomic structure showing electrons orbiting the nucleus at high speed (which is used even today in books and advertisements when needed to signify modern science) was wrong.The orbitals should be replaced by waves surrounding the nucleus.

Schrödinger's work also sent shock waves through the physics world.Suddenly physicists were able to look inside the atom itself, at the waves that make up its electron shells, and pick out precise predictions for those energy levels that fit their data perfectly. But there remains a nagging problem that still haunts physicists from time to time even today.If electrons could be described by a wave, what would that wave look like?This has been answered by physicist Max Born, who said that these waves are actually waves of probability.These waves just tell you the probability of finding a particular electron at any place and at any time.In other words, the electron is a particle, but the probability of finding that particle is given by Schrödinger's wave.The bigger the wave, the more likely it is to find a particular particle at that point.

With these advances, suddenly chance and probability, which had previously brought us precise predictions and detailed trajectories of particles, from planets to comets to cannonballs, were being introduced directly into the heart of physics. This uncertainty was finally formulated as a rule by Heisenberg when he proposed the uncertainty principle, that is, it is impossible to know the exact speed and position of an electron at the same time, and it is also impossible to know the exact speed and position of an electron at a specific time. Its exact energy is measured.At the quantum level, all the basic laws of common sense are violated: electrons disappear and reappear elsewhere, and electrons can be in many places at the same time. (Ironically, the godfather of quantum theory, Einstein, who helped start the revolution in 1905, and Schrödinger, the man who gave us the wave equation, were horrified at introducing chance into fundamental physics. Einstein Stein writes: "Quantum mechanics is in dire need of high respect. But some voice from within tells us that this is not the real Jacob. The theory has much to offer, but it hardly ever brings us closer to God's secret. Just For me, at least, I'm sure he doesn't play dice.") Heisenberg's theory was revolutionary and widely debated—but it worked.Physicists were able to explain a large number of puzzling phenomena at once, including the laws of chemistry.To give my Ph.D. students an insight into how weird quantum theory is, I sometimes have them calculate the probability that their atoms will suddenly dissipate and pop up on the other side of the brick wall.Such teleportation events are impossible in Newtonian physics, but are indeed allowed in the realm of quantum mechanics.The answer is that we have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe for it to happen (if you used a computer to draw a Schrödinger wave of your own body, you would find that it closely resembled your physical features, only drawn The curves will be a bit fuzzy, some of your waves will flow out in all directions, and some of your waves will even extend to distant stars. So there is a small chance that one day you will find yourself waking up on a distant planet ). The fact that electrons appear to be in many positions at the same time forms the basis of chemistry.We know that electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom, like a miniature solar system.But atoms and solar systems are not the same.If two solar systems collide with each other in space, the solar systems will be fragmented and stars will be thrown into the depths of space.However, when atoms collide, they usually form extremely stable molecules, sharing electrons between them.In high school chemistry classes, teachers often refer to it by a "scattered electron" that closely resembles a soccer ball and binds two atoms together. But what chemistry teachers rarely tell their students is that electrons simply aren't "scattered" between two atoms.This "football" actually demonstrates that the electrons are located in many directions at the same time inside the football.In other words, all the chemistry that explains the molecules in our bodies is based on the idea that electrons can be in many positions at the same time, and that it is the sharing of electrons between two atoms that holds the molecules of our bodies together.Without quantum theory, the molecules and atoms in our bodies would instantly disintegrate. This unique but profound property of quantum theory - that even the most bizarre events can occur within finite probabilities - was exploited by Douglas Adams in his fascinating novel The Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy .He needed a convenient way to travel across the Milky Way at high speed, so he invented the Infinite Improbability Drive, "a new and ingenious way to traverse vast interstellar distances in almost zero seconds, A tiresome waste of time in space".His machine allows you to change the probability of any quantum event at will, so that even the most improbable events become commonplace.So, if you want to rush to the nearest galaxy, you just need to change your probability of reincarnation on that galaxy.Then, voila, you're instantly teleported there! In reality, the quantum "jumps" that are so common in atoms cannot simply be generalized to large objects, such as humans containing trillions of atoms.Although the electrons in our bodies dance and dance on their wonderful journey around the nucleus, there are so many of them that their motions cancel each other out.Roughly speaking, that's why matter appears solid and stable at our level. So, while teleportation is possible at the atomic level, we'd have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe to actually witness these strange effects at the macroscopic level.Could one use the laws of quantum theory to build a machine to teleport things on demand, like in science fiction?Surprisingly, the answer is a reserved "yes." The key to quantum teleportation lies in a 1935 paper by Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen.They ironically proposed the EPR experiment (named after the three authors) as a last-ditch effort to prevent the introduction of chance into physics. (Einstein lamented the undeniable experimental success of quantum theory, writing: "The more successful quantum theory is, the more stupid it looks.") If two electrons initially vibrate in unison (a state called "coherence"), they can remain undulating even if they are separated by a large distance.Although the distance between two electrons may be measured in light years, there is still an invisible Schrödinger wave connecting them, like an umbilical cord.If something happens to one electron, some of that information is immediately sent to the other electron.This is known as "quantum entanglement," in which coherently vibrating particles have some sort of deep connection between them that links them together. Let's start with two coherent electrons wobbling in unison.Then, let them fly out in the opposite direction.Each electron is like a spinning top.The spin of each electron can be strengthened or weakened.Let's assume the spin of the whole system is zero, so if one electron's spin increases, you automatically know that the other electron's spin decreases.According to quantum principles, until you make a measurement, the electron's spin neither increases nor decreases, but exists in a state of synchronously increasing or decreasing spin (once you make an observation, the wave function "collapses", making A particle stays in a finite state). Second, measure the spin of an electron.Assuming it's spinning up, you immediately know that the other electron's spin is slowing down.Even if two electrons are separated by many light-years, just by measuring the first electron, the spin of the second electron is immediately known.In fact, you got this information faster than the speed of light!Because the two electrons are "entangled," that is, their wave functions beat in unison, their wave functions are connected by an invisible "thread" or "umbilical cord."Anything that happens to one of the electrons automatically has an effect on the other (meaning, in some sense, anything that happens to us automatically and instantly affects things in faraway corners of the universe. Because Our wave functions may have been entangled at the beginning of time. In some sense, there is an entangled web linking the far corners of the universe, including ourselves).Einstein derisively called this "spooky action at a distance," a phenomenon that allowed him to "prove" quantum theory wrong, since in his view nothing could move faster than the speed of light. At first, Einstein designed the EPR experiment as the death knell of quantum theory.In the 1980s, Alan Aspect and his colleagues in France performed the experiment using two detectors separated by 13 meters, measuring the spin of photons emitted from calcium atoms, The experimental results agree precisely with quantum theory.Apparently, God does play dice in the universe. Can information really travel faster than light?Was Einstein wrong that the speed of light is the speed limit of the universe?not quite.Information does travel faster than the speed of light, but the information is random and therefore useless.You can't send a real message or Morse code through an EPR experiment, even if the message travels faster than the speed of light. Knowing that an electron on the other side of the universe is slowing down its spin is a piece of useless information.You cannot send today's stock quotes through this method.For example, let us assume that a friend always wears a red sock and a green sock, in random order.Suppose you look at one of his feet, and that foot is wearing a red sock, then you know—faster than the speed of light—that the other sock is green.Information does travel faster than light, but this information is useless.Signals that do not contain non-random information can be sent in this way. For years, the EPR experiment was held up as an example of how quantum theory triumphed over its critics, but it was a victory of no real value and has had no real impact until now. Everything changed in 1993.Scientists at IBM, led by Charles Bennett, used EPR experiments to prove that teleporting objects is physically possible, at least at the atomic level (more precisely, they proved that you can teleport a all the information contained in the particle).Since then, physicists have been able to teleport photons and even whole cesium atoms.Within a few decades, scientists may be able to deliver the first DNA molecules and viruses. Quantum teleportation exploits some of the more exotic properties of EPR experiments.In these teleportation experiments, physicists start with two atoms, A and C.Suppose we wish to send information from atom A to atom C.We start by introducing a third atom, B, which is initially entangled with C, so B and C are coherent.Now atom A starts to make a connection with atom B. A scans B, so that the information content of atom A is transferred to atom B. A and B become entangled during the connection.But since B and C were originally entangled, the information in A has now been transferred to atom C.Finally, atom A has now been transferred to atom C, that is, the information content of A is now exactly the same as that of C. Note that the information inside atom A has been destroyed (so that there are no two copies after the transfer).This means that anyone who is supposed to be teleported will die in the process.But the informational content of his body would appear elsewhere.Also note that atom A has not moved to the place of atom C.Instead, it is the information in A (for example, its spin and polarization) that is transferred to C (this does not mean that atom A disintegrates and then quickly moves to another location, but that the information content of atom A has been transferred to another Atoms - on C). From the earliest announcement of this breakthrough, the race to make progress has been fierce.Because the different groups are all trying to outdo each other.Photons of ultraviolet light were teleported in the first historic demonstration of quantum teleportation, which took place at the University of Innsbruck in 1997.This experiment was followed by an experiment at Caltech the following year with a more precise experiment involving teleporting photons. In 2004, physicists at the University of Vienna managed to use a fiber-optic cable to transmit particles of light 600 meters below the Danube River, setting a new record (the cable itself was 800 meters long and was suspended under the Danube. below the public sewer system. The sender is on one side of the river and the receiver is on the other). These experiments were met with a rebuke: They were performed using photons of light, which is hardly the stuff of science fiction.It was therefore important to demonstrate quantum teleportation in 2004 using real atoms rather than photons of light, bringing us one step closer to a more practical teleportation device.Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Washington have managed to entangle three beryllium atoms and transfer the properties of one atom to the other.The achievement was so significant that it was on the cover of the journal Nature.Another group also successfully teleported calcium atoms. In 2006, another, more remarkable advance was made, involving a macroscopic object for the first time.Physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and the Max Planck Institute in Germany have successfully entangled a beam of light with a gas of cesium atoms The achievement of trillions of trillions of atoms.They then encoded the information contained within the laser pulses and successfully transmitted this information over a distance of about half a yard to the cesium atoms. "For the first time ever," says Eugene Polzik, one of the researchers, "quantum teleportation is achieved between light, the carrier of information, and atoms." The progress of teleportation is accelerating rapidly. Another breakthrough came in 2007.Physicists propose a form of teleportation that doesn't require entanglement.Solving entanglement, the single most difficult feature of quantum teleportation, could open up new possibilities for teleportation. "We're talking about a beam of about 5,000 particles disappearing from one place and reappearing somewhere else." Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Quantum Atom Optics in Brisbane, Australia ) physicist Aston Bradley (Aston Bradley) said he worked hard to develop a new form of teleportation. "We felt our proposal was closer to the spirit of the original novel-like concept," he announced.In their approach, he and his colleagues used a beam of rubidium atoms, transmitted its entire information into a beam of light, sent that beam through a fiber-optic cable, and then reconstructed the original atomic beam.If his claims hold up, the approach would remove the number one stumbling block to teleportation and open up entirely new avenues for teleporting larger and larger objects. To distinguish this new method from quantum teleportation, Dr. Bradley has named his method "classical teleportation" (which is a bit ambiguous because his method also relies heavily on quantum theory, but not on entanglement). The key to this novel teleportation is a new form of matter called a Bose-Einstein Condensate, or BEC, one of the coldest substances in the entire universe.In nature, the lowest temperatures are found in outer space, 3K above absolute zero (this is caused by the residual heat left over from the Big Bang, which still fills the universe).But a BEC is a millionth to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, a temperature that can only be found in a laboratory. When certain forms of matter are cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, their atoms all drop precipitously to the lowest energy state, so that all of their atoms vibrate in unison and become coherent.The wave functions of all the atoms overlap, so that in some sense a BEC is like a giant "superatom" with all its atoms vibrating in unison.This strange state of matter was predicted by Einstein and Satyendranath Bose in 1925, but it was not finally discovered until 1995 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Colorado. ) was manufactured, a full 70 years have passed. Here's how Bradley and his companions' teleportation devices work.First, they started with a set of ultra-cold rubidium atoms in the BEC state, and then exposed a beam of matter to the BEC (also composed of rubidium atoms).The atoms in these beams also want to plummet to their lowest energy state, so they vent their excess energy in pulses of light.This light beam is then fed into a fiber optic cable.Remarkably, this beam contains all the quantum information necessary to describe the initial beam of matter (for example, the positions and velocities of all its atoms).The beam then hits another BEC, which in turn turns the beam into the original beam of matter. This new form of teleportation holds great promise because it does not involve the entanglement of atoms.But this approach also has its problems.It relies heavily on the properties of BECs, which are difficult to manufacture in the laboratory.Furthermore, the properties of BECs are quite unique in that they behave as if they were one giant atom.In principle, exotic quantum effects that we can only see at the atomic level could be seen in a BEC using the naked eye.This was once considered impossible. An immediate practical application of the BEC is to create "atomic lasers".Naturally, laser light exists on the basis of coherent beams of resonant photons.But a BEC is a collection of resonant atoms, so it is possible to create a perfectly coherent beam of BEC atoms.In other words, a BEC can create an analog of a laser—an atomic laser, or matter laser, made of BEC atoms.The commercial application of lasers is huge, and the commercial application of atomic lasers is also of profound significance.But because BECs exist only at temperatures floating above absolute zero, progress in this field will be slow, albeit steady. With this rapid progress, when will it be possible for us to teleport ourselves?Physicists hope to be able to teleport complex molecules within the next year.After that, a DNA molecule or even a virus may be delivered within a few decades.There is nothing in theory that prohibits teleporting a real person - like in a sci-fi movie.But the technical problems facing this great achievement are indeed very difficult.There must be some of the best physics laboratories in the world being used to create coherence between just tiny photons of light and individual atoms.Creating quantum coherence involving truly macroscopic objects, such as people, will undoubtedly take a long time to achieve.In fact, it would take many centuries, maybe more, before every object could be teleported - if it were even possible at all. In the end, the fate of quantum teleportation is closely tied to that of the development of quantum computers.Both use the same quantum physics and technology, so there is a high degree of mutual benefit between the two fields.Quantum computers may one day replace the familiar digital computers on our desks.In fact, the future of the world economy may one day depend on such computers, so there is enormous commercial interest in these technologies.Silicon Valley could one day turn into a "rust belt," replaced by new technologies from quantum computing. Ordinary digital computers operate on a binary system of 0s and 1s, called "bits."But quantum computers are far more powerful.They operate on quantum bits (qubits), which can calculate values ​​between 0 and 1.Imagine an atom placed in a magnetic field and it spins like a top so that its axis of rotation can point either up or down.Common sense tells us that our atoms can spin up or down, but not both at the same time.But in the strange world of quantum, an atom is described as the sum of two states, the sum of an atom turned up and an atom turned down.In the wonderful world of quantum, every object is described using the sum of all incredible states (if a large object, such as a cat, is described in this quantum way, it means that you have to take a live cat is added to the wave function of a dead cat, so that the cat is neither dead nor alive—as I explore in more detail in Chapter 13). Now, imagine a string of atoms arranged in a magnetic field, spinning in the same way.If a laser beam is shone on top of this string of atoms, the laser beam will jump off the group of atoms, flipping the axis of rotation of some atoms rapidly.By measuring the difference between incoming and outgoing laser beams, we have performed a complex quantum "calculation" involving the rapid movement of many spins. Quantum computers are still in their infancy.The world record of a quantum computer is 3×5=15, which is not considered to have a computing power that can replace today’s supercomputers.Both quantum teleportation and quantum computers suffer from the same drawback: the need to maintain the coherence of a large number of atoms.If this problem can be solved, it would be a major breakthrough for both fields. The CIA and other secret organizations are extremely interested in quantum computers.Many ciphers in the world rely on a "key", which is a very large integer, and all that needs to be done is to factor it into prime numbers.If the key is the product of two numbers with 100 digits each, it might take a digital computer over 100 years to figure out the two factors from scratch.Such a cipher is currently essentially undecipherable. But in 1994, Peter Shor of Bell Labs demonstrated that factoring such numbers would be a piece of cake for quantum computers.This discovery immediately hurt the interests of intelligent groups.In principle, a quantum computer can decipher all the codes in the world, pushing the security of today's computer systems into complete disorder.The first country to successfully implement such a system will be able to decipher the deepest secrets of other countries and organizations. Some scientists have speculated that the future world economy will depend on quantum computers.Silicon-based digital computers are expected to reach the physical limit of their computing power scaling sometime after 2020.A new, more powerful family of computers may become necessary -- if the technology is to keep advancing.Other scientists are exploring the possibility of replicating the intelligence of the human brain through quantum computers. Doing so, however, requires a very high stakes.If we can solve the problem of coherence, we can not only solve the teleportation challenge, but perhaps use quantum computers to have all kinds of technological advancement capabilities in unknown ways.This breakthrough is so important that I will return to this discussion in a later chapter. As I pointed out earlier, coherence is extremely difficult to maintain in the laboratory.The tiniest vibration can disturb the coherence of two atoms and ruin the calculation process.目前我们很难维持仅仅是少量原子的相干性。最初同步的原子会在1毫微秒、最多1秒之内开始消相干。传送必须非常迅速地完成，赶在原子开始消相干之前，这样便为量子计算机和隐形传送造成了其他的限制。 尽管有这些挑战，牛津大学的大卫·多伊奇（David Deutsch）还是相信这些问题可以克服：“凭着运气，凭着近期理论进步的协助，一台量子计算机或许能在远远少于50年的时间内制造成功……那将是一种全新的利用自然的方法。” 要制造一台有用的量子计算机，我们需要使数百到数百万原子一致地振动，这是一项远远超出我们目前能力的挑战。传送柯克船长会是极度艰巨的，我们不得在一对柯克船长之间制造一个量子纠缠。即便有了纳米科技和先进的计算机，也很难想象这将如何实现。 因此，隐形传送还只存在于原子水平，我们或许终将在几十年内传送复杂的分子、甚至是有机分子。但是要实现一件大型物体的传送，将必须等上几十年到几百年，或者更久——如果它的确可能的话。因此，传送复杂分子，也许甚至是一个病毒或一个活细胞，符合“一等不可思议”的要求，应该会在本世纪之内成为可能。但是传送人类，虽然被物理定律所允许，或许也要在那之后花上好几百年——假设它真的可能。因此，我将那种类型的隐形传送定义为“二等不可思议”。